An Exegesis of Luigi Mangione: Part 2 – Our Relationship

My relationship with Luigi and what I thought of him

This is part two of a five-part series on Luigi Mangione:

• Part 0: Preamble - Background and stage setting for the series

• Part 0.5 – My Intentions – Why am I writing this series and what do I hope to gain?

• Part 1: Social Media Timeline – A unified timeline of his social media history

• Part 1.5: More Social Media – Luigi’s Instagram, Steam, and Twitter Lists

• Part 2: Our Relationship – My relationship with Luigi and what I thought of him

• Part 3: Social Media Analysis – Summarizing and analyzing Luigi’s online activity

• Part 3.5: Who Is Luigi? – My assessment of Luigi’s interests, life, and personality

• Part 4: Did He Do It? – Exploring possible motives or alternative explanations

• Part 5: Wat Mean? – What does the shooting mean for our society

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Introduction

In Part 1: Social Media Timeline I laid out a 16,000-word unified timeline of Luigi’s known social media. This was an important pre-requisite to making the rigorous assessment of his interests, personality, and life trajectory I wish to make in Part 3.5 - Who is Luigi?. Or at least the best I can do with the limited information we have today.

However before that it’s time to go into the thing everyone seems to care way too much about: his and my “relationship”.

In this post I will detail our public and private interactions spanning March to May 2024 in chronological order, explain what they mean, reflect on them, and then close out with my assessment of him at the time.

As discussed in various comment sections and in Part 0.5 – My Intentions I have wrestled with whether to share our DMs. However, I have concluded to do so for the following reasons:

1. The speculations I make in future posts will be (minorly) influenced by our DMs. But I also don’t want you to take my speculations at face value. I want you to be able to examine the evidence yourself and form your own opinions, albeit while giving me the opportunity to frame things properly.

2. There is only a few and I don’t believe they reveal any particular bombshells. Just more context atop the large mountain of data everyone already has.

3. There are many people who greatly dislike me but follow me anyway because of their interest in the DMs. My hope is that putting everything I have out on the table will, after of course a brief increase in interest, conclude their preoccupation with me.

4. Because the prosecution may similarly take an interest in me (and likely consider subpoenaing, and thus doxxing, me), if they believe I have any private information about Luigi. My hope is that putting everything into the public domain will make them less likely to see value in doing so.

So let me make this explicit: After this post, there will be no information I have that you and everyone else do not also have. I will no longer have anything special to contribute. I hope to return to my rightful place as just one more anonymous moron in the sea of anonymous morons who has spent an unhealthy amount of time researching this topic.

A few final notes for context before diving in:

1. At the time of these interactions Luigi had basically no followers. I can’t remember the number but my sense is that it was like 80. He was functionally just posting into the abyss with zero or close to zero engagement for all of 2024. Furthermore, as far as I can tell from going line by line through every single post on his X account, I’m the only person who even replied to any of his comments.

2. I had a personal policy until December 2024 that I “don’t do DMs”. I only even checked them like once every few months and only replied to those sent from people I like. I replied to Luigi’s first DMs because I liked him, but never even saw his second set until I went looking for them in December after his name was announced. I was obviously pretty shook by this, and wondered if things could have gone in a different direction if I had been more active in private messaging. I have thus changed this philosophy and now work hard to get back to people within a more reasonable time frame. But such was not the case back then.

Finally, while I hope you will take the time to read the rest of the article so you can understand them in the actual context of our “relationship”, I know many would much prefer to jump to their own conclusions. So fine. Here is a screenshot of the DMs in all their nothing-burger glory.

Now, onto the timeline.

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Mar 31, 2024: Subscribed to my Substack

As far as I can tell, the first interaction we had was him subscribing to my Substack.

It says he was directed from Twitter so he’d likely followed me there first. Given how choosey he was with his Substack subs, I assume he had seen and liked a few tweets of mine about memetics or post modernism prior to this to “earn” his sub.¹

I did not publish any new posts during the time he was active. And according to Substack event logs, he did not read any old posts. So while it may have been a funny joke to say that I “radicalized” him, it appears he actually has not read anything I’ve written besides a few tweets and I had little if any influence on him.

Apr 1, 2024: fixing society vs oneself

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

4:25PM – Me - Posting on my own profile: “Why is so much of the internet obsessed with fixing society instead of themselves? Obsessed with statistical averages they can’t control, ignoring that they could easily become an outlier? Trying to solve near impossible challenges when they have no experience solving simple ones?”

4:42PM – Luigi – Replies: “Maybe because there is overlap in these problems? (fixing society vs fixing the self) E.g.: observing how smartphones negatively impact on a societal level helps me understand how mine impacts me on a personal level + how I can fix my own use”

4:46 PM – Luigi - Replies again: “I.e.: the same problems + solutions exist across the progressive levels of the emergence tower:” and then he links to Tim Urbans Emergence Tower chart.

5:28 PM – Me - “This is actually a big aspect into my point. If you cannot solve problems lower on the emergence tower, you cannot solve problems higher on it. That’s not to say you must solve ALL problems lower, but if you cant solve ANY OF THEM you are definitely going to only cause harm.”

5:31 PM - Me - “Basically JBP’s “clean your room” meme. Yes it’s true that there are some people who cannot clean their room who can do much more useful things. But they can all certainly do things of similar complexity. Eg having good relationships or being financially savvy etc”.

5:32 PM – Me - “If you cannot do ANYTHING of complexity n in the emergence tower, you will only cause harm in trying to have impact on complexity n+1 (god forbid, complexity n+100).”

Explanation:

For anyone not familiar with Tim Urban’s Emergence Tower, it’s basically a mental model for seeing humans and their organizational structures as recursive or fractal. i.e. In the same way that in your body you have individual cells which work together to make one of your organs function, and your organs work together to make you function—you yourself are a “cell” in the “organ” of your community and the “organ” of your community is one of many that make up the broader “body” of your country, etc and this fractal nature of things leads to similar behaviors or solutions up and down the tower.

Thus, Luigi is saying that being able to observe how something, such as smartphones, harm the larger meta organism of society helps him also understand how it impacts him personally and how he can fix his own use.

Reflection:

This is our first interaction as far as I can tell.

I always read Luigi’s response of “Maybe because there is an overlap in these problems?” as a genuine question and lack of certainty on his part. However, it is possible he meant it in a snarky way of “because the problems overlap, duh, idiot”. But given the thoughtful and generous nature we see from him in the rest of his social media, I think my initial read is most likely.

Another interesting aspect to this interaction is that Luigi answered a different question than the one I was asking. I asked “why does everyone want to fix society” to which his response of “understanding what’s wrong with society helps me fix myself” is a bit of a non-sequitur. My guess is that he read it as “Why is everyone so interested in what’s wrong with society?” instead. Maybe this is nothing. Maybe me just being a bad communicator. Worth keeping our eye out for more instances of this elsewhere though to see if there is a pattern.

Also, Luigi “liked” my 5:28 and 5:31 replies but not the OP nor 5:32 one.

Apr 4, 2024: First DMs

Interaction:

7:14 AM – Luigi – sends DM to me: “You have way too many galaxy brain takes on this platform to have less than 3k followers. Problem is half your shit is retarded”

7:24 AM – Luigi - “would be interesting if twitter created another feed with certain criteria for access. Ex: pass a test to prove that you can interpret a graph and some basic ‘factfulness’ style questions about state of modern world. You would generate more discourse. Also they could probably just take that shit and replace the government.”

8:32 AM – Luigi - “Also, if you have a take for what monetary / political forces are driving this I’d be curious” then links to the same post he sent to Tim Urban but has since deleted.²

2:11 PM – Luigi – “This is the retarded shit i’m talking about”. Then links to this post of mine where I say “Bullying women online is fun. This cannot be debated. But one must acknowledge that it is akin to bullying children. The true misogynist must have the restraint to ignore women online.”

Explanation:

His first message is basically saying “you are smart and say some really cool stuff but also some really dumb stuff”. In his fourth message he clarifies what he is referring to, quoting my misogyny post.

It thus seems reasonable to assume that when he says “half your shit is retarded”, he is referring, at least in part, to when I say disparaging things about women or minority groups on the platform.

His second message I still am not totally clear on, but my understanding is that he is proposing something akin to locking some tweets behind a “paywall” except you basically take an IQ test instead to earn access.

Why he is suggesting this, I can only speculate. He did reply to a tweet from someone else back in Jan about people’s inability to read basic statistical graphs, and perhaps believed if you could gate certain areas of the internet behind some kind of intelligence tests you could improve the discourse.

As far as his statement “you could probably replace the government with this”: I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.

Reflection:

This is the first time Luigi DMs me and his second time engaging me.

Given that he opened the conversation with basically trying to convince me that demeaning protected groups was bad for business, I think we can reasonably assume he himself did not hold any such socially unacceptable notions.

When I initially read and replied to these a few weeks later (see Apr 25 below), and even when re-reviewing them in December, they felt very disjointed and strange. It appeared he was jumping from topic to topic, and then also just kind of “barfing” his thoughts with little concern about how coherent or persuasive they would be (or was at least struggling to articulate himself in a way that I found coherent or persuasive).

However, looking at them now with the timestamps, I can see that actually he left the conversation and came back to it three times. First after 10 minutes to send his idea about intelligence-gated posts, then again about an hour later to ask for my feedback on his now deleted tweet, then again six hours later to clarify his original message.

So while not quite as indicative of schizo-brain (I say this with deep affection, I love my schizo’s), it still appears like a rather raw and unfiltered way of interacting, seemingly without regard for the traditional moors of conversation.

What would lead him to engage in this way with someone he’d only had a few short tweets with previously? Perhaps he’s got that ‘tism? This seems unlikely now given our knowledge of his social aptitude. Perhaps he is just a very assertive and direct person? Or perhaps he was genuinely trying to be persuasive and focused but it is just a skill he struggles with? Or maybe him being a rather offline and highly extraverted person made him very socially skilled IRL but not so much online? Or maybe he was actually so socially skilled he was just mirroring the exact way in which I had responded to him in our public interaction? Or was he perhaps uniquely interested to engage with me because of the rarity of our shared interests, which caused him to “text first, think later”? Or maybe believed that I was trying to build a big following but saw I was “shooting myself in the foot” toward this end and so was trying to just give advice?³ Or maybe he was annoyed by my so called “retarded” tweets and impulsively started the chat to express his disapproval, and then regretted his boldness and was trying to backtrack (but then doubled down two messages later???)? Or maybe he was just nervous or in a rush and I’m reading way too much into it??? Honestly, the more I try to dissect it, the more I’m left with questions rather than answers.

All I can confidently say is that it certainly felt like an unusual way to slide into someone’s DMs.

Apr 8, 2024: the genetics of depression

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

4:00 AM - @Rokomijic - makes a post on his profile about a news article of an attractive woman who has decided to kill herself via medically assisted suicide. He writes: “This woman in the Netherlands is dying of feminism. Her boyfriend could save her life by making her barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and keeping her away from therapists and so on. Modern Western culture is extremely psychologically unhealthy”

1:00 PM - @electronluke – replies to Roko: “Not how major depression works. Count yourself lucky that you've never experienced it. I inherited genes for it from my father and I'm not enough of a jerk to gamble on passing them on”

1:18 PM – Me - I QT electronluke’s post to my own profile. I write “It is both sad and irritating how many people believe shit like this. Many above average minds possessed by these retarded dysgenic memes made up by ‘experts’.”

3:14 PM - Luigi - replying to my post “Wdym. You don’t believe depression has a genetic component? The issue with this guy is that he’s discounting ‘nurture’ so hard he’s voluntarily ending his own bloodline”

6:22 PM – Me - I reply “there is not a gene or set of genes that make you depressed. There is a set of genes that predisposes you to developing the bad habits/mental models/mental hygiene that lead to depression. But no one is genetically depressed.”

6:23 PM – Me - I add “Same thing as addiction. Your genes don’t genetically doom you to alcoholism. They might make your body like alcohol much more than average. They might make you more impulsive and find resisting alcohol more difficult than average. But they don’t make you an alcoholic.”

6:26 PM – Me - I add “Everyone’s genes screw them in some ways & benefit them in others. There is utility in acknowledging which cards you were given. But a pessimist whiner will find an excuse for even the best hand while an optimistic high agency person will find a way regardless of a shit hand.”

6:54 PM – Me - I add “to be fair, most pessimistic whiners were severely abused as kids. Or at least raised by retarded dysfunctional people. There is certainly a non-zero influence from genes. But it’s nowhere near all of it or probably even half of it.”

Explanation:

My position on the genetic influence of depression is that your genes don’t make you depressed, they only predispose you to be more likely to develop depression when raised in a poor environment.⁴ I somewhat obtusely state this in my first QT to which Luigi asks for clarity on and then I go on to clarify in my subsequent replies.

Luigi implicitly conveys agreement that nature and nurture both impact depression and that those who fixate only on nature are both in error and harming themselves with this error.

Reflection:

While Luigi can be very assertive with his views, he is also very evidently curious and open to changing his mind. The fact that he thought I was saying there is no genetic pre disposition for depression but still wanted to hear my argument for it is just one of many examples supporting this.

Also, Luigi liked my 6:26PM reply but not any of the others.

Apr 25, 2024: Second DMs

Interaction:

Three weeks after Luigi’s messages, I finally check DMs, see his, and reply:

9:46 PM - Me - I heart react to his message where he says “this is the retarded shit I’m talking about”. I then reply “Just saw this now. Hello, I am gay. And retarded.”

11:01 PM - Luigi - Luigi hearts the message. Then quotes his own message where he links me to his now-deleted tweet and appends “Please ignore. Way too high and thought this was profound”.

11:01 PM - Luigi - Quotes his own message where he said “this is the retarded shit I’m talking about” and appends “Seriously though. I get that half your good ideas stem for the fact that this is an unfiltered anon account where you can shoot out tweets stream-of-conscious w/o worry about offending anyone. But this sort of shit is *purely* retard. Probably loses a lot of followers”

Explanation:

Seems straight forward on what was said.

Reflection:

As a reminder, I did not see these messages until I checked DMs on Dec 9^th after his name was announced.

I think the biggest, and perhaps only, new piece of evidence from this whole article is Luigi’s explicit admission that he was “high”. High on what, we can only speculate. However given his deep interest in psilocybin mushrooms (which I will dive into more in Part 3.5 - Who is Luigi?) I think that is the most likely candidate. Maybe weed in second place.

Another interesting aspect here is that he very perceptively understood exactly what my Twitter is: “an unfiltered anon account where you can shoot out tweets stream-of-conscious w/o worry about offending anyone”. A lot of fairly smart people still don’t understand this about my account, and the fact that Luigi picked up on it so quickly is certainly significant.

What that significance is, I am not sure though. Is he a genius? Or maybe really good at reading into people’s motives? Or did he perhaps have a similar account? Or at least want to have one?

My guess is that it comes from personal experience of him having the same dilemma I have—a very active mind bursting with intrusive thoughts but unable to explore them anywhere “real” without “breaking things” (i.e. upsetting people, harming my social standing or reputation, or at best just confusing people and seeming like a crazy person).

Finally, it is interesting that he reiterates for a 3^rd time how much he disapproves of the unfiltered nature of my account. As I expressed in Part 0.5 it is my contention that trying to suppress the whirlwind of schizo thoughts that run rampant in my mind causes more harm than vomiting them into the abyss on a lowbie X account. But this clearly displeased Luigi.

Why did he want to convince me to not put this stuff on Twitter? Is it because he thought some of my ideas were great and wanted to signal boost me like he did with the other people he liked, but couldn’t do so without risking his reputation? Or was it because he had a core belief that the completely unfiltered expression of the highly active mind must be suppressed? And if the latter played any part, could the suppression of his inner-schizo have played any part on the events that have since transpired?

May 10, 2024: Third DMs

Interaction:

I did not see his April DMs yet. He follows up with these additional DMs in May:

7:49 AM – Luigi - “Can I ask why you follow Chris Langan? Genuinely appreciate your tweets – without fail they always give me something to think about. That’s why I’d be curious why you follow Langan. From what I can tell he just schizo posts into the void about how twitter is shadow banning him. I can’t seem to find any value in what he says (besides it being a case study on a genius ruined by his own isolation and disagreeableness).”

7:49 AM – Luigi - Quotes his previous message and continues “by “without fail” I’m referring to your tweets with actual content, not “I am gay retard” comments. Which are like half of them”.

Explanation:

Chris Langan is famous for having one of the highest recorded IQs in the world but spending his life being basically a blue collar farmer.

Langan’s X posts consists mostly of “alt right” talking points and conspiracy theories (often racist ones) and was at the time going through a spat of rants claiming the X algorithm suppresses his content.

Evident by Luigi’s public replies to Langan here and here, he was aware of Langan’s IQ fame but found his takes to be “self-important” and “bizarre” “schizo ramblings” “complain[ing] ad infinitum into the void”.

Reflection:

Reminder that I did not open my DMs and see these until December. And I was not aware of his interest in Langan until writing Part 1.

My guess on why he cared enough to explore Langan and, furthermore, enough to ask me about him, was because he was trying to “check his own priors”. Asking himself “this guy has one of the highest IQ’s in the world. Is he a genius saying genius stuff and I’m just an idiot for not understanding? Or is he actually just so smart that it drove him insane?”. However, I had this exact question around Luigi’s age about people similar to Langan, so I could just be projecting.

Another peculiar aspect of these messages is that Luigi for the fourth time reinforces his position that I have some good takes but I also have a lot of bullshit takes. More than 50% of our DMs is basically him just trying to reinforce this point. Why he felt this so important to communicate to me is likely significant but, as mentioned above, I can only speculate as to why.

Though this question does reinforce my theory that Luigi had a personal distaste for “schizo posting into the void”. We can speculate where it stems from but I think we can reasonably claim at this point that Luigi believed all discourse should be respectful and respectable, and that saying off the cuff bullshit or trolling was not productive.

May 15, 2024: Religion as false but adaptive

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

12:42 AM - Me - posting on my own profile I write “why is the number of people who are considering the possibility that religion is a product of fitness-enhancing memetic selection so miniscule? Like there’s literally millions of Darwinist atheists in the world and yet there seems to be less than 1000 who have ever even asked the most basic question of: ‘if religion is so bad and evil and dumb and wrong, why hasn’t atheism outcompeted it ever in all of human history for more than a few decades at a time?’”

1:37 AM - Luigi - replies “This always baffles me too. Not a difficult concept. When I was 15, I wrote a paper about Christianity's rise over (secular) Roman Paganism due to fitness-enhancing benefits for the plebs:” And then links to his Highschool Paper, How Christianity Prospered by Appealing to the Lower Classes of Ancient Rome

2:09 AM - Me - replies “I love u”

Explanation:

This one is pretty hard to explain succinctly for the uninitiated. I’ve tried and failed with a few thousand words previously. Apparently, one of Luigi’s favorite writers, Steve Stewart-Williams, did a better job in his book The Ape that Understood The Universe. But I will try:

It is my contention that religions are fitness-enhancing memes. Basically, in the same way that genetic evolution is a product of random mutation and natural selection, memetic evolution is a product of the same processes—people just come up with beliefs effectively at random and then across millions of people over thousands of generations we come to ideas that are “true” and “good” because the ideas that were “false” and “bad” caused their believers to die off while the “true” and “good” ones allowed their believers to survive and expand. And furthermore, this seems to me a reasonable and obvious extension for anyone who claims to believe in Darwinian theory.

Luigi appears to agree with this contention and shares an essay he wrote about it in high school.*

Reflection:

While I had a generally positive view on Luigi by this point, it was this comment that led to me feeling a genuine connection to him. If not for his shared interest in this topic, I honestly probably wouldn’t have cared enough to write this series. But convincingly articulating and then popularizing the view that ideas, religions most importantly, are organisms subject to selection is something I hope to do one day before I die. And I can count on two hands the number of X users I’ve found who have shared a similar view. So when I find one, I develop an immediate affection toward them. Which is why I responded with “I love u” (which Luigi “liked”).

*I think I only skimmed his essay back in May. However after reading it twice since December, I don’t think it actually makes a case for Christianity being “fitness enhancing”, rather just why it would have been appealing to switch to. But I can certainly see how his research in high school coupled with his subsequent research into Darwinian Theory would inevitably lead to him coming to the perspective we share on the topic.

May 15, 2024: Postmodern architecture

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

The original account I QT’d that initiated this no longer exists, taking their original post along with them. I can’t remember exactly what it said but I am pretty sure it conveyed something along the lines of there being a group of “elite” in control of the world, who, among other things, push demoralizing art, ideas, etc to keep people subjugated and depressed. I QT’d it and wrote:

11:28 AM – Me – On my own profile:

The system is not “designed”, it is emergent. It is an organism seeking, like all organisms, to expand itself across space and forward through time. And thus is a product of natural selection. The functions that increase its fitness proliferate; the ones that don’t, don’t.

The state, like all memes, has a symbiotic relationship with its host [(us)]. It assists the host in certain ways and costs it in other ways. When the meme is new and the host is in [control], the meme is weak and it must cost little and benefit a lot. But as it makes the host more powerful, the host’s dependence on it increases. This increases the meme’s leverage in the “negotiation”, allowing it to extract without being “punished”.

In general, when the meme provides more net benefit than cost, it expands and grows. When it’s equal, it stalls. And when it is a net cost, it shrinks. But due to [the] scale of the system, the time it takes for effects to move all the way through it can be years or even decades.

This is made further complex by the fact that memes (or memeplexes i.e. related memes cooperating to form a larger meme) themselves compete. If there are no systems with better cost benefits, the system will continue to expand even when it is a net negative (because the hosts BATNA is garbage)

This is why a 2% tax was overthrow-the-government worthy 300 years ago while today 50% tax is tolerated.

So how do you replace a bad meme? Not by killing it when you are still dependent on it. Thats how you get everyone killed (à la communism).

It was not an accident or coincidence that slavery was ubiquitous until the 1800s. Notably, still 200 years after the Enlightenment ethos of “all men are created equal”. For the new meme of “slavery bad” to proliferate, the industrial revolution needed to occur, to allow it to be abolished without completely collapsing civilization in the process.

The same thing is true of the state or the modern monetary system. Until there is an alternative that meets the needs of the original meme and which has low switching cost, nothing will change.

12:27PM – Luigi - Replies with a QT from Jash Dholani of a clip of Tucker Carlson claiming that postmodern architecture is designed to kill your spirit. Does not include any text with the QT.

1:30 PM – Me - replying to Luigi:

This is true but it doesn't contradict my point.

The degree to which post modern art/architecture is designed to kill your spirit is a product of projection and “misery loves company” of its creator. They themselves have already had their spirit killed. They are mostly trying to express this. There is of course a little bit of them trying to force this awareness on you out of resentment. But the “intent” here is unconscious and a minor factor.

The more important factor here is that all the creatives today have dead spirits in the first place. Nothing they produce is beautiful anymore. Because the death of God killed their spirit. If there is only the brutal material world, if there is no transcendent, if the base nature of reality is not driven by love, then there is no beauty, there is no meaning. Sure you can manufacture a simulacrum of it, as Dawkins et al try to do, but they mostly fail and the degree to which they succeed is actually just tapping into our religious wiring. A beautiful lie to fulfill our need for beautiful lies.

Thus, post modern brutalism is just the logical conclusion of the spiritual zeitgeist. If transcendent beauty is fake and gay and value is determined by capital efficiency, then the most capitol efficient buildings ARE beauty. They ARE calling to and manifesting the higher order of the values that underly our society.

Sure, normies are downstream from this stuff. But the great thing about normies is that they have evolved to have no need for connection to reality as it is. They are like cockroaches, able to survive and thrive with any type of metaphysics.

The e-right likes to imagine that the normie is less happy with his pornhub and vidya and sodapop than were he a warrior and a poet and a hero. But this is all projection. It is only the sensitive autistic retard who is phased by the ugly metaphysics (and its consequences) of the modern world.

The most ironic thing here is that the normie does not care that the beautiful lies are lies. He was entirely happy with Christianity. It is us autistic retards, and our insatiable pursuit of accuracy and logic[al] consistency, that we killed God and created the brutal post modern hellscape we so deeply despise.

8:39 PM – Luigi: Replies to my comment:

I should have added some context with that clip. I wasn't trying to contradict you, but rather bolster your point. Tucker is spot-on in recognizing that modern architecture kills the spirit, but his very first line "post-modern architecture is designed to demoralize and hurt you", paints the phenomenon as intentional. In the same way that inflation is not "intelligently designed" to oppress people, neither is modern architecture. It's emergent. Yes it is oppressive, but that's a fallout of selective pressures to build fast/cheap irrespective of aesthetics.

My point here is that even when people have brilliant insights, they often blatantly get the causation wrong. Modern equivalent of "this drought / famine was caused by the rain gods", because causation gives people comfort. Because the idea that phenomenon are the results of amorphous systems outside of our control is scary[.]

Explanation:

My OP is an attempt to articulate one of my core ideas:

The present structure of the Global American Empire (or any large complex social system) should be examined as if it were an organism wishing to survive, subject like any other to the pressures of Darwinian selection. This is in contrast to the way most people perceive it, as a product of “intelligent design”— a system shaped by the “will of the people” (democracy) or a shadowy cabal of elites (oligarchy).

Thus, the characteristics or functions it adopts are those which help improve its own survival rather than its populace (who are more akin to its food source). And the degree to which it can exploit us is the degree to which we are dependent on it. Today it is extremely exploitative and that makes everyone (rightfully) mad and wish to destroy it. But the problem is that we are completely dependent on it and killing it would require killing ourselves in the process.

I conclude with the proposal that the only way to “defeat” it is to become less dependent on it, likely by building some kind of alternative new system we can rely on instead and that this is where intelligent people should focus their energy.

Luigi replies with a Tucker Carlson video asserting that postmodern architecture is “intelligently designed” to demoralize you to which I retort that Tucker is seeing something real but gets the causation backwards.

Luigi responds clarifying that he agrees with me, saying that Tucker is an example of accurately perceiving the phenomena but getting the causation wrong. And furthermore that this is a common issue amongst “brilliant” people and proposes that our drive to anthropomorphize and attribute conscious will to complex system stems from us feeling helpless and afraid when confronted by the idea that no one is in fact in control.

Reflection:

Luigi is obviously very intelligent and thinking deeply about complex systems in a way that I can’t imagine more than ten thousand people on the planet share. This interaction only compounded my appreciation for his understanding of these topics and his “pursuit of the truth” conversation style.

With that said, this interaction always left me feeling a bit perplexed. I always found it hard to believe he genuinely thought that posting the Tucker video without explanation would convey his point of agreement. It seemed to me at the time more likely that he changed his mind when I challenged him rather than that is what he was trying to communicate all along.

But assuming I’m not just an idiot who is easily confused (not impossible) I am now leaning more too taking it at face value. And when doing so, it appears more to support a growing hypothesis I have about him: that he may have struggled to communicate clearly to others things that were very clear to him in his own mind.

Whether this stems from just a feature of his personality (ex I know many very intelligent people who can comprehend big ideas but which you might not know because their talent or skill at communication is not at the same level), a lack of experience talking with others about topics this complex (ex not having a friend group in his real life who had similar interests that he could verbally spar with to refine his communication), or something else, we can only speculate. Although I suspect it was a bit of both.

May 22-25, 2024: Pretty Huge Dick

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

5/22 12:10 AM – me - posting on my own profile “Do any of you retards have a PhD? I have questions”

5/24 1:16 AM – Luigi - replies “ya”

5/24 8:07 PM – Luigi - replies again, QTing his “ya” and appending “Pretty huge Dick”

5/24 8:17 PM – me - replies “Hardy har wise guy”

Explanation:

Seems obvious but: Luigi is saying “ya I have a PhD. A Pretty huge Dick”.

Reflection:

Not much to say. Just a banger from a funny guy.

I missed the original reply and so did not initially respond. But Luigi was committed to the bit and made sure that he completed his joke whether I was gonna set him up for it or not. Lol.

LM did like my “hardy har wise guy” reply.

May 27, 2024: Gaylord brain injury unit

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

5/27 11:02PM – me - on my own profile: posted a picture of a medical center called the “Gaylord Brain Injury Unit” with the caption “there’s no place like home”.

5/28 2:21AM - @nearcyan - posts on their own profile “I Think short-form video apps may just literally cause blatant brain damage”

5/28 8:09AM – Luigi - replies to @nearcyan’s post with my “there’s no place like home” post

Explanation:

Pretty straight forward.

Reflections:

Not much to say. It was a bit of a non-sequitur reply on his part. But my guess is he just thought the image was funny and it seemed like a good enough excuse to use the photo.

May 28, 2024: Norm Macdonald Joke

Link to interaction here

Interaction:

5/27 9:29AM - @YacineMTB - posts on his profile “wait why is there something rather than nothing at all??”

5/28 10:36PM - Me - I QT Yacine and write “If this question doesn’t haunt you, you are gay.”

5/29 7:50AM - Luigi - replies to my post with “so you’re saying this question doesn’t haunt you. Also you don’t have a doghouse”

Explanation:

1. Luigi is making a joke that this question doesn’t haunt me, implying that I am gay.

2. Luigi is referencing the classic Norm Macdonald joke that one can logically deduce whether a man is heterosexual or not by whether or not they have a dog house.

Reflection:

Luigi was most likely engaging in a bit of friendly banter, playing on the inside joke between me and my followers that I am “gay and retarded” as opposed to attempting to genuinely insult me.

Also fun fact: this post blowing up was how I found out about Luigi being named as the shooter. Hundreds of likes and comments appeared on the post on December 9^th. It took me a few hours to notice, at which point I was confused and assumed some big account just reposted Luigi’s roast of me. It wasn’t until several hours later that I figured out the true reason.

What did I think of him prior to his arrest?

Okay so given these interactions, what was my assessment of Luigi back during this time?

I’ve mostly explained these in the above reflections but to summarize:

I perceived Luigi as intelligent, thoughtful, respectful, assertive but not aggressive, and a bit eccentric (or as twitter parlance would declare him “a bit schizo”). Being intelligent and strange is not uncommon with the people who choose to engage with me on Twitter. I would say it is the rule rather than the exception—people like LM are my kind of people. It is however fairly exceptional to be this but also not-an-asshole. And further exceptional to be all these things and well-read in the niche sub-domains I am most interested (memetics, universal Darwinism, post modernism, etc).

Luigi was thus one of only a dozen or two people on X who I’ve had recurrent, pleasant and interesting interactions with. Despite that there were only a few, I saw him as someone of significance as a result.

We obviously did not agree on all conclusions. Or even on what ideas were worth entertaining. But as “high rung thinkers” neither of us care much about what people believe, only in what methodology they use to arrive at their beliefs. And our association, as perhaps fleeting and insignificant as it may have been, was bonded via our shared commitment to the methodology of rationality and thoughtful inquiry.

While certainly being a bit odd, he did not appear in any way to me to be someone who was “insane”, “deranged”, nor capable of or interested in extreme violence. He did not show a single shred of resentment or anger in any of our interactions.

Him making three separate attempts to start up conversations in DM suggested to me he was seeking to have a closer relationship. I of course can only speak for myself but: were it not for the fact that I am an extreme introvert who for some reason people really want to hang out with, and thus have more friends than I know what to do with so actively resist fostering internet friendships: I think we would have been fast friends if we had engaged more.

What did I think of him after his arrest?

So how has my perspective on him changed after his arrest?

Well first, when his PhD joke tweet went viral in December, I immediately recognized him, remarked to myself that I hadn’t seen him in a while, and wondered what he had been off doing these last few months.

A few hours later when I finally figured out why the tweet went viral, my first surprise was actually the realization that his PFP and bio were not made up. It is not uncommon in the weird anon schizo intellectual spheres I frequent for people to use false persona’s (usually as some kind of experiment or because they just think it’s funny). And the idea that a handsome kid from an Ivy League school would have 80 followers, engage with a freak like me, and actually know what he was talking about seemed far less plausible than that he was just a fellow autistic freak LARPing as something else.

Besides that, I didn’t really have an opinion on him or the situation. I thought it was certainly unexpected to say the least. I racked my brain trying to figure out what could have motivated him to do it. Which led to my ensuing multi-month obsession with trying to figure it out.

What do I think of him after 100+ hours of research?

The long answer will come in Part 3.5 - Who is Luigi?. The short answer is: not much. Everything I’ve learned since has more or less jived with who I perceived him to be back then. My research has not really brought me any closer to figuring out what could have motivated someone like Luigi to do what he allegedly did. Does this suggest that he did not in fact do it? Or just that we know too little about him to determine his true motive? I will explore several hypotheses in both directions in Part 4.

That is all for now. If you found this post interesting and want to be notified as soon as these future installments are released, feel free to…

1. If anyone knows of a tool or has enough experience with the Twitter API to help me go back through and find which Tweets he liked without me having to go through each one by one, please let me know. I’m curious, but not enough to do it manually.

2. If anyone can find his deleted post, I would really like to read it.

3. I’m deeply aware that I am “shooting myself in the foot” toward the objective of building a big following. I know exactly how people will feel about my naughty posts and I post them largely because I do not want a big following. If I ever decide that I want Minor Dissent to be something that matters rather than a waste management system for my intrusive thoughts that prevent me from doing the stuff that does matter to me, I will turn this off. I have obviously turned it off while writing this series. What will become of it after the series is over is TBD.

4. My position on the genetic influences of depression is entirely in line with the scientific consensus by the way. It is doctors, media, and laymen who are “misinformed”. The heritability (h²) of depression is roughly 0.4, meaning that about 40% of the population variance in depression risk can be attributed to genetic factors. To be clear, an h² of 0.4 does not mean 40% of your depression is genetic nor even that you have a 40% chance of becoming depressed if a parent was. Like per capita or median, it is only relevant on an aggregate level. With that said, the best studies on individual risk say that having a parent who is depressed increases your risk of developing depression by 2 to 3 times over someone who does not have a depressed parent. A 2 to 3 times increase is not a guarantee. Far from it. Ultimately, the research pretty universally agrees that other variables like childhood trauma, stress, social support levels, and even diet and exercise play a far larger role in whether you develop depression than your genes do. And this is not even getting into the fact that you can cure like 90% of your depression by doing some very basic things you already know you should be doing but don’t.